Why My Tune Has Changed On Freelancers & Contractors - (Ep. 0040)
My thinking, over the years, on hiring freelancers and other people with nonpermanent status has really changed a lot over time. I used to be of the opinion that I wanted to hire lifers, people who are in it for the long haul, people who could develop deep company knowledge and really kind [00:00:30] of be there forever. I still want to hire folks with some of those attributes. There's nothing wrong with that. I think was has changed is this staunch anti-freelancer or anti-contractor approach, and there's a few things that kind of changed my mind.
I think the first is that hiring freelancers is a really great way to run experiments. They might [00:01:00] be more expensive per hour, but there are definitely people with highly-developed skillsets that have developed those skillsets over long periods of time that are staunchly committed to being contractors. They like it for a variety of lifestyle or other reasons, and they've developed deep expertise. You can hire them fairly quickly to [00:01:30] work on really important things in your business and test them out.
When you test them out, you don't have to permanently commit to spending a certain amount of money per year. You don't have to invest in recruiting like you otherwise would. You don't have to invest in health insurance, but most importantly, you can pivot. If you run an experiment and it works, then perhaps you double down on that experiment or you decide to scale it, and that [00:02:00] might involve hiring someone full time, but if it doesn't work, you can just part ways when that makes sense and kind of within the terms of the contract you've established.
When it comes from everything to branding to SEO to writing to all kinds of different tasks, I think now I'm much more likely to hire a freelancer to test and [00:02:30] see if that works. Often, the freelancer won't be right, but the basic idea of what were attempting is right, and hiring that freelancer really allowed us to evolve our idea of what we need in a given position. It could be that our initial thoughts on the skillset or consolation of skills that would be required to create wins, that our initial idea of that was completely wrong, [00:03:00] and hiring a freelancer allows us to realize that. Then we can hire another freelancer and see if we nail it.
Then, if that works, maybe we move to a full-time position or maybe, and this often happens, that the freelancer does bring a lot of success, but they bring success around something that only needed to be executed once over a period of three months, or with a lot of marketing things, someone [00:03:30] can bring success and then, over the course of six to eight months, that traffic opportunity or that advertising opportunity or that paid media opportunity kind of the ship has sailed on making that work because the economics of ad buying changed or competition in the space heated up, and there's no longer an opportunity there.
Yeah, so my thoughts have really changed on this. I've also found that [00:04:00] there are some people that are so good at what they do that it's near impossible for a company of our size to hire them as full-time employees, but it's absolutely possible to hire them as freelancers, whether they're for-hire CFOs that have advanced skillsets in a given area or what have you. My tune has really changed here. I used to be [00:04:30]
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